Food Is the Thrill at Some Bachelor Parties

BY tradition, a bachelor or bachelorette party is a night of Dionysian excess. How that unfolds is a matter of taste.

For some, it entails a liberating number of drinks and a close encounter with the taut, spray-tanned skin of an exotic dancer. But for one recently married man and his friends, it meant bottles from a good winemaker to accompany the crispy, golden skin of a roast suckling pig.

“For the groom, carnal pleasure involved eating,” said Archie McAlister, 43, explaining why he reserved the chef’s table at the Breslin in Manhattan for a bachelor party he held earlier this month for Theo Peck, 38, a cook. “They brought the pig, then this slender girl came over and butchered it down for us and chopped it into little pieces. I don’t mean this in a leering way, but that was the female entertainment for the evening.”

Rounding out the feast were roasted fennel, potatoes cooked in duck fat, broccoli rabe, salsa verde and generous pours of a dry albariño from northern Spain and a fruity young Beaujolais-Villages. According to Mr. McAlister, a cabinet maker, the evening satisfied all the senses without getting anybody into trouble.

It was one of a number of recent events where future brides and bridegrooms have decided to trade in the bump and grind for the tasting menu. Some have made pilgrimages to the temples of haute gastronomy, while others rolled up their sleeves and made an elaborate dinner with their friends. A culinary bachelor party, participants say, can be a night to remember. Which stands in contrast to some pre-wedding excursions, where the activities are best forgotten, or at least denied.

“It’s not just going out and getting wasted,” said Elissa Crum, a 30-year-old nursing student, who booked the private room in May at Colicchio and Sons for a bachelorette party for her best friend from high school. “Later on, we could talk about dinner and say things like, ‘Do you remember the agnolotti with the octopus and the pork belly?’ ”

Restaurants like Per Se and WD-50 in New York and Coi in San Francisco have catered to bachelors and bachelorettes with tasting menus and wine pairings that might last three hours or longer. Hen parties have taken over some of the cabins at Blackberry Farm, an inn on 10,000 acres in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, where meals are often a luxurious multicourse events: foraged morels stuffed with homemade sausage, saddle of rabbit wrapped in Benton’s country ham.

Even in Las Vegas, where selective memory is a civic virtue, memorable meals have been the focus of stag and hen parties. Recently, a group of men took over the Krug Room, a private room at Restaurant Guy Savoy in Caesars Palace, and paired a seven-course dinner with seven vintages of Krug. The wine brought the bill to more than $1,000 a person.

Photo

Theo Peck, in glasses, celebrated his bachelor party at the Breslin with roasted fennel and a dry white wine.Credit
Jonathan Corbin

“The groom specifically requested the black truffle and artichoke soup,” said Franck Savoy, the restaurant’s general manager. “They were extremely sophisticated and knew what they wanted. It was the opposite of ‘The Hangover.’ ”

Andrew Loewenstern, 37, a software developer and a dedicated gourmand, flies around the world with his friends, descending on destination restaurants. Last year they went to Spain for a meal at El Bulli. Mr. Loewenstern celebrated his bachelor party two weeks ago at Alinea in Chicago. His friends converged on the city, flying from San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. (Bonus: Phish was playing in town, too.)

The five men had the 25-course “tour,” a tasting menu that lasted late into the night and included a king crab presentation that Mr. Loewenstern is still talking about.

“You eat the crab morsel” in a small depression in the center of a plate, he said. “Then they remove the cover and there is another, more elaborate and even more beautiful crab preparation inside. Then you think they’re taking the dish away, but they remove the center piece and there is actually a third crab preparation,” what he called “the best crab au gratin you could imagine.”

The dish may be the contemporary bachelor’s equivalent of a woman jumping out of a cake.

“This type of experience is as much fun as you can have with your clothes on,” Mr. Loewenstern said of the meal, before launching into Jermaine Stewart’s 1986 hit, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.”

Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of Alinea, said that the restaurant has hosted around 10 bachelor and bachelorette parties in the last year. “When you think about a bachelor party, what are you really trying to focus on?” he asked. “For some people, it’s ‘I want the best meal of my life.’ Yes, it’s about the food and wine. But it’s still a bachelor party. There’s an energy that is palpable. They’re out to have fun. But they’re doing it their way, which is cool.”

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Darcy Miller, the editorial director of Martha Stewart Weddings, noted a decline in “cookie cutter” bachelor and bachelorette parties. “People want to do something unique,” she said. “A sit-down dinner where you’re having a real conversation and having toasts is a more intimate experience than running around and bar-hopping.”

The intimate conversations aren’t just taking place at restaurants. “Cooking schools do a lot of these parties,” Ms. Miller said.

Indeed, the Brooklyn Kitchen, a cookware shop in Williamsburg with classes on subjects like home brewing and canning, has hosted six bachelorette parties in the last year. Most are multicourse dinners made from scratch, with plenty of wine and snacking while the meal is prepared. A pickling party is scheduled for next month.

Caroline Fey of the Mariposa Kitchen in San Francisco recently guided a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids through a five-course meal with the honeymoon in Tuscany in mind: roast pork with rosemary, sage and garlic; fried baby artichokes with aioli; lemon ricotta tart.

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Casey Oetgen, left, at a party she helped organize.Credit
Amanda Kingloff

“It’s a communal experience,” Ms. Fey said. “It’s a good environment for bridesmaids coming in from all over the country. You work together in a cooking class, so even if you don’t know each other, you get to know each other.”

When Casey Oetgen, a lawyer, helped organize a bachelorette party at Pizza a Casa on the Lower East Side, almost every one of the 17 women brought a bottle of prosecco or another wine. They made more than two dozen pies, from the classic margherita to one with truffled honey and Grayson, a funky taleggio-like cheese from Virginia. During downtime they played games like “Guess the Ex.”

In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that women go in more for do-it-yourself group activities, while men are more likely to sit back and be served. Restaurateurs also suggest that the bachelorettes are more rowdy.

“The women will get goofy,” said Wylie Dufresne of WD-50, who has stood in his open kitchen posing for photographs with more bachelor and bachelorette parties than he can count. “They have an active sense of fun. In general, women are louder, men are bigger consumers.”

Still, the steak-and-a-stripper formula may never go out of style. Some epicures see a Michelin-starred meal as just the start of the night’s amusements. Others have tried to mix the two, which can lead to complications.

At St. John, the London restaurant where nose-to-tail eating was first elevated to an art form, bachelor parties are such a regular event that men who ask about holding one are sent a letter outlining a code of conduct.

“We’re appealing to a sense of good manners,” said Thomas Blythe, the general manager. “I don’t mean it’s an Edwardian list of etiquette. It’s more to let them know that they’re not the only group in the dining room.”

The letter is clear on that point. “Stag groups can be noisy and we therefore do not recommend coming to St. John if the expectation is for a rowdy, bawdy and boisterous evening,” it reads. “We do not tolerate abusive, disrespectful or destructive behaviour. Cleaning and or damage costs will be added to the bill at the manager’s discretion on the evening. We do not serve rounds of shots or chasers.”

Not everybody is dissuaded. “A long, long time ago, a policewoman walked into the bar,” Mr. Blythe said. “We were concerned at first, but then an observant bartender recognized that she was wearing stilettos.”

The management approached her before she could start removing her uniform, Mr. Blythe said. “We explained that we weren’t that kind of establishment.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2010, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bacchus Keeps His Clothes On. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe